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Pharos Network Hits $1B Before Launch: Inside the Ant Group RWA L1 That Just Raised $44M

· 10 min read
Dora Noda
Dora Noda
Software Engineer

A pre-mainnet blockchain just closed a $44 million Series A at a $1 billion valuation — and the cap table reads less like a crypto round and more like an institutional tokenization war plan.

On April 8, 2026, Pharos Network announced the close of its Series A, bringing total funding to $52 million. The lead investors were not the usual DeFi-native suspects. They were Sumitomo Corporation — the $450 billion Japanese trading house — and Chainlink, alongside SNZ Holding, Flow Traders, GCL New Energy, and a quiet list of Hong Kong regulated financial institutions and Asia-based private equity funds.

For context, the entire tokenized real-world asset (RWA) market sits at roughly $24–26 billion. Yet Pharos, which has not launched mainnet, is already valued at 4% of the market it intends to eat. Either that is the most aggressive institutional conviction trade of 2026 — or the "Solana killer" playbook has found a second life in the RWA vertical.

The Cap Table Is the Real Product​

Most crypto fundraises disclose a few marquee VCs and hide the rest. Pharos's Series A did the opposite: the project publicly emphasized who is not a crypto fund.

Sumitomo Corporation, participating through a subsidiary, is a $450 billion-revenue Keiretsu member. For a Japanese trading house of that scale to write a check into a pre-mainnet L1 is a leading indicator — not a lagging one. Mitsubishi UFJ and MUFG have already run tokenized securities pilots; Sumitomo backing Pharos signals that tokenization infrastructure is now a corporate-strategic, not a venture-speculative, line item in Japanese conglomerates.

Chainlink's participation matters in a different way. Chainlink rarely writes strategic equity checks into L1s beyond its oracle partnerships. Its investment in Pharos telegraphs that Chainlink's Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) will likely be the default messaging layer for tokenized asset distribution on the network — turning Pharos into a preferred settlement venue for any asset issuer already plumbed into Chainlink's pricing and proof-of-reserve infrastructure.

Then there is GCL New Energy — a publicly traded Chinese renewable energy giant that invested at "nearly $1 billion valuation" in March 2026, a month before the broader Series A closed. Real-world energy balance sheets deploying into RWA chain equity is the quiet signal that commodity and energy tokenization use cases — not just Treasuries and private credit — are already being scoped at the institutional level.

Flow Traders adds a liquidity-making dimension. SNZ Holding brings Asian private wealth rails. The unnamed Hong Kong regulated FIs fold in the HKMA compliance corridor right as Hong Kong finalizes its Stablecoins Ordinance licenses.

This is not a crypto round. It is a tokenization consortium dressed as one.

The Ant Group DNA​

Pharos was founded by Wish Wu and Alex Zhang — both formerly of Ant Group, China's largest fintech and the operator behind Alipay's billion-plus user base. Alex Zhang served as CEO of ZAN, Ant Group Digital Technologies' Web3 subsidiary, and previously as CTO of AntChain. Wu was Chief Security Officer at ZAN.

That pedigree is significant for two reasons.

First, Ant Group's core engineering competency is not smart contracts — it is scaling a regulated payment network to over a billion users under a demanding compliance regime. That is exactly the skill set tokenized asset infrastructure requires: high throughput, deterministic finality, and compliance primitives baked into the protocol rather than bolted on at the application layer.

Second, the talent exodus from Ant Group's Web3 and AntChain teams tells you something about where Chinese fintech believes the next platform value will accrue. Building a public L1 is a harder strategic bet than staying inside a consortium chain — and the fact that this team made the jump, and that Chinese renewable energy capital followed them, is a read on where Asian institutional tokenization ambition is heading.

The Technology: Full-Lifecycle Parallelization​

Most "high-performance" L1s parallelize execution only. Pharos claims to parallelize the entire block lifecycle — consensus, execution, storage, and data availability — as a concurrent process.

The target numbers are aggressive: 30,000+ transactions per second, one-second block finality, sub-second user-facing confirmation. The architecture combines:

  • AsyncBFT Proof-of-Stake consensus with pipelined parallel processing
  • Dual VM support — EVM for Solidity compatibility, WASM for performance-sensitive modules
  • A dependency-aware Scheduler that predicts transaction read/write sets, analyzes dependencies, and batches non-conflicting transactions for parallel execution
  • Pharos Store — a storage layer that embeds the Merkle tree directly into the storage engine, collapsing the I/O path from the typical eight-to-ten disk reads per state access down to one-to-three

That last point — storage engine innovation — is the most underrated part of the pitch. High TPS is cheap to claim in benchmarks. The bottleneck that kills production L1s is state I/O under sustained load, and collapsing the disk-read multiplier is a genuine architectural improvement rather than a marketing number.

Whether these figures hold up post-mainnet under real adversarial load is the open question. The Atlantic Ocean testnet, currently in its Phase 3 incentivized epoch, has reportedly onboarded millions of unique addresses — an unusually large pre-mainnet footprint that at least suggests the architecture survives synthetic stress.

Circle, USDC, and the RealFi Settlement Layer​

In March 2026, Pharos announced that USDC and Circle's Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP) will deploy natively on its mainnet — branded "The Pacific Ocean." That integration is the keystone that turns Pharos from an L1 thesis into a working settlement layer.

CCTP establishes native cross-chain connectivity between Pharos and more than 20 supported blockchains, enabling over 400 secure transaction routes without wrapped assets or third-party bridge risk. USDC becomes the primary settlement and collateral asset for tokenized treasuries, private credit, commodities, and DeFi lending on Pharos.

Pair this with the Chainlink strategic investment and the infrastructure story writes itself: Chainlink provides pricing and cross-chain messaging, Circle provides native dollar liquidity and burn-and-mint cross-chain transfers, and Pharos provides the execution and compliance substrate. It is the three-layer institutional tokenization stack Ethereum has refused to opinionate on and that Pharos is offering as a bundled vertical.

Three RWA L1s, Three Theses​

The Series A forces a clean comparison with the other two credible institutional L1 contenders. Each is solving tokenization with a different shape of answer:

Plume Network launched mainnet in June 2025, hit SEC-registered transfer agent status in October 2025, and manages roughly $645 million in tokenized assets across 180+ building projects. Plume's thesis is RWAfi — making tokenized assets composable with DeFi at the protocol level. Its edge is regulatory: the transfer agent approval lets Plume clear tokenized securities on-chain in a way competitors cannot.

Tempo, incubated by Stripe and Paradigm, raised $500 million at a $5 billion valuation — five times Pharos's valuation. Tempo's bet is different: it is a payments-first chain, not a tokenization chain, with Visa, Stripe, and Zodia Custody as validators. Design input came from OpenAI, Shopify, Mastercard, UBS, Visa, Deutsche Bank, Revolut, and Nubank. Tempo wants to be the settlement rail under stablecoin payments rather than the home of RWA issuance.

Pharos slots between them. Its compliance-in-consensus design and Sumitomo-anchored cap table target tokenized assets, but its Circle + Chainlink integration and 30,000 TPS target reach into payments territory too.

If the 2026 tokenization market is heading toward $50 trillion in TAM — as the bull case argues — there may be room for specialization across all three. If tokenization ends up consolidating onto Ethereum L2s (where BlackRock's BUIDL and Franklin's BENJI already sit), then vertical RWA L1s face the same fate Solana killers faced in the 2021 cycle: impressive benchmarks, thin on-chain activity, and underwater valuations eighteen months post-launch.

The $1B Question​

Pharos's $1 billion pre-mainnet valuation is a deliberate statement. It is roughly 4% of the entire existing tokenized RWA market, and it is being funded by the exact institutional categories — Japanese trading houses, Chinese energy majors, HK regulated FIs — that would need to deploy capital for the $50 trillion TAM thesis to play out.

Three things will decide whether the valuation holds:

  1. Mainnet reliability. Q2 2026 mainnet launch is the single largest execution risk. A chain that markets 30,000 TPS cannot afford a single chain halt in its first quarter, especially with Sumitomo on the cap table.
  2. Institutional issuance, not retail airdrops. Pharos needs its first billion-dollar tokenized product to come from a Sumitomo-tier issuer, not a yield-farming protocol. The Circle + Chainlink plumbing only pays off if real assets land on top of it.
  3. Regulatory clarity in Asia. The HKMA stablecoin licensing rollout, the Japanese Financial Services Agency's evolving tokenized securities stance, and Korea's institutional RWA pilots are all 2026 catalysts. Pharos has positioned itself for the Asian regulatory tailwind — if that tailwind stalls, the Asia-weighted cap table becomes a liability rather than an asset.

What It Signals for the Broader Market​

The Pharos round is one of three 2026 data points — alongside Tempo's $500M round and Plume's SEC transfer-agent status — that together draw a clear line: tokenization infrastructure is now priced as a strategic asset class, not a venture experiment.

The implications for developers and builders are concrete. RWA chains in 2026 are no longer monolithic "Ethereum competitors"; they are vertical-specific settlement layers with pre-wired Chainlink oracles, Circle stablecoins, and compliance primitives. Which means the next generation of tokenization dApps will not be ported wholesale from Ethereum — they will be built against a choice of execution venues with different compliance and performance envelopes.

The open risk is familiar. Pre-mainnet unicorn valuations have a checkered track record in crypto. Aptos, Sui, and a dozen other L1s launched with similar institutional fanfare and spent their first year defending token prices rather than shipping flagship products. The difference with Pharos may be that the check-writers are not trying to flip the token — they are positioning for a decade-long tokenization build-out, and their exit is a Sumitomo-branded tokenized fund, not a Binance listing.

That is a subtly different game. Whether it is a game Pharos wins is the question the Pacific Ocean mainnet will answer within sixty days.

BlockEden.xyz provides enterprise-grade RPC and indexing infrastructure across 27+ chains, including the EVM ecosystem that Pharos and other institutional L1s rely on. Explore our API marketplace to build tokenization, payments, and RWA applications on infrastructure designed for institutional scale.

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